Balls Read Online Free

had stopped and Henry looked south to the top of the MetLife Building where the sun poking through white clouds shone bright. In the path of a warm June breeze he recalled a time when the MetLife sign had read PANAM and he was young, healthy, mischievous, free. He could plead and protest with a great freedom of mind, he could fantasize about the impossible, he could even fear God.
    But what did I do? said Henry, to himself. How did I ruin my testicle?
    Thinking back through the apartments in which he’d lived, those uptown and downtown, on the East Side and West, on no block did he see a power plant or chemical refinery, a garbage facility or telephone company which might have housed cancer-giving toxins. He ate well, lots of fruits and vegetables, drank moderately, smoked only on rare occasions. His coffee intake could be very high. But what did that mean about his testicles? Perhaps this was the result of stress.
    It was true, six years ago, in the autumn of 2004, Henry did begin to suffer an odd condition. He didn’t feel right, he was off, his equilibrium askew, his vision gray. He saw the world as if a filter had been slipped over his eyes. He thought he was dying, but he went to doctors and they told him he was fine, a strong and healthy young man. Try not eating salt, suggested one neurologist, it could be that you have high blood pressure. For three months Henry hardly ingested salt. His state didn’t improve. (He could kill that doctor.) But he let another doctor scan his brain and yet another peer into his ears, his chest and liver, too. Nothing explained his symptoms. An ophthalmologist outfitted him in a pair of wire-rimmed specs, but the dizziness persisted. Because his vision was fine, the world was in focus, it was the color, the tint and vibrancy which appeared unlike it had in his first twenty-four years of life.
    He was earning money teaching piano to children, but he could barely get through a lesson. The filter strained his energies. At home his writing was suffering. Fragmented parts which he couldn’t expand into whole songs, he had more of these than he knew what to do with. For the first time ever his mind was too clouded to make sense out of notes. His frustration mounted. It became too painful to sit at the piano. He even covered the instrument in a white tablecloth, the sight of it was cutting away at whatever good judgment remained in him. He began to think and behave in other odd ways, too. For instance, he’d written in black marker on his refrigerator a statement about his body, that it must be functioning according to its age:
    For why did I ever think that I’d feel physically well through my twenties when a time existed not long ago in the long history of humankind when thirty—not eighty—was considered old age? Why wouldn’t I be breaking down at twenty-four? This is normal. The body changes. It weakens. It chips. It fractures and fails. Don’t fret. Don’t cry about it. But accept and move on. This is life.
    Every day Henry feasted on new platitudes, and for a while he bought into them, too. Along the edge of his desk he’d scrawled in blue ink:
    Visual filters are a physical reality faced by all people everywhere. No two people see the world alike. We all have our own filter. And mine is gray in tone. So there it is.
    One rationale after another refracted through him until his second year of dizziness when he descended further into depression. His piano remained covered in a sheet. He’d stopped giving lessons and was working concession at a movie theater downtown. The fear of spending the rest of his life in a vertiginous state had him considering suicide. To live sixty more years perhaps, just like this.
    I’ll never make it, thought Henry.
    Riding the subway one afternoon he ran into an old friend, Whitney Shields, the clarinetist. Whitney was twice Henry’s age. The nose on his tender face was long and narrow with a complex,